End Compliance Nightmares With Cross Data Center Replication
The complexity of managing data across globally distributed data centers while ensuring compliance with data protection regulations like GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and DPDPA (Digital Personal Data Protection Act) can be daunting. These regulations emphasize data sovereignty, privacy and localization, forcing global businesses to be mindful of where and how their data moves across borders.
Global organizations require data to be distributed across geographies and availability zones for redundancy and performance and to maintain business continuity in the event of hardware failure or disaster. Best practice is to apply cross data center replication (XDCR) capabilities to synchronize distributed databases across locations.
Many organizations typically use database replication in conjunction with a security gateway/proxy that intercepts traffic and applies security controls that adhere to data regulations. While direct control over network traffic may sound like a good idea, the gateway architecture not only adds a hop, but can also quickly become a policy configuration nightmare. Further, this architecture may need to additionally store things transiently and add storage and latency overhead if there are any hiccups in traffic.
A more streamlined, lower latency and higher throughput solution is to choose a global database that first filters data and then replicates it. This removes the delay and complexity introduced to replication by the proxy security gateway architecture.
Below we’ll explore how XDCR with filtering capabilities can help share data while adhering to regional data locality regulations.
Why Is Data Locality Important?
In today’s interconnected world, businesses often have users and operations in multiple countries. However, different jurisdictions have unique data protection requirements. Two of the most important regulations are GDPR, which requires personal data of EU citizens to remain within the EU unless specific conditions for cross-border data transfer are met, and DPDPA, India’s new data protection law, which imposes similar data localization requirements to protect Indian citizens’ data. Similar regulations exist for China, the Philippines, Mexico, the United Kingdom and others.
These regulations aim to ensure data sovereignty by controlling how and where data flows, preventing misuse or unauthorized access. For companies with data centers in multiple countries, this creates a significant challenge in balancing global data processing needs such as high availability and low-latency query response with regional compliance demands.
The solution lies in smart data replication strategies where only compliant data is shared, and sensitive data remains within the jurisdiction in which it was collected. XDCR without strong filtering can lead to compliance violations, so applying filters during replication is essential for achieving compliance.
Achieving Data Locality Compliance With XDCR and Filters
The combination of XDCR with robust filtering and data transformation methods facilitates compliance. Let’s dive into how XDCR can be configured to maintain compliance with data residency requirements.
XDCR typically allows data replication at a database, namespace or table level, and incorporating filters is crucial for ensuring data residency compliance. XDCR filters ensure that only nonsensitive or allowed data is replicated between regions while protected data is stored locally. For example, if data from an EU region contains personally identifiable information (PII), XDCR can filter out sensitive fields when replicating to non-EU data centers, ensuring compliance with GDPR.
Databases with XDCR that support record-level (row or tuple) and attribute-level (column or field) filtering provide the capability to select the data that should be replicated to other clusters and leave others localized. This is particularly useful for excluding sensitive records and fields like usernames, addresses or payment information when replicating data.
Powerful, precise configuration of the filtering applied to replicated data is a critical security control related to replication. Greater flexibility and configuration options improve filtering’s ability to enforce data locality regulations. Databases allow complex predicates to be expressed which, when used to express XDCR filtering rules, allows for a wide variety of policies to be enforced. A strong solution can slice and dice records and fields at wire speed based on source and destination cluster. Access controls protect data on source and destination clusters, while data in transit is encrypted.
Data classification is a crucial mechanism for regulatory compliance. Within the database, metadata-based tags, such as “public,” “confidential” or “restricted” can be used to classify each record. These tags need not be explicitly materialized each time a record is written. Instead the tags are expressed as filters, then XDCR applies these filters on the fly to ensure that only appropriate data types are replicated to certain regions. For example, records tagged “public” can be replicated freely between all data centers, those tagged “confidential” are only replicated to authorized data centers and those tagged “restricted” are prevented from replicating across borders entirely.
Metadata tagging using XDCR filters is a powerful combination that enables organizations to maintain data sovereignty controls while still allowing the movement of nonsensitive data.
Consider a real-world scenario involving a global e-commerce platform with data centers in the EU, United States and India:
- EU customers’ data: The platform collects PII, such as names and addresses, from EU customers. To comply with GDPR, these records are stored exclusively in the EU data center. XDCR filters exclude any sensitive fields from being replicated outside of the EU, ensuring compliance with GDPR data residency requirements.
- India customers’ data: For customers in India, sensitive data is stored in Indian data centers in compliance with the DPDPA. The XDCR configuration ensures that all sensitive fields remain localized while nonsensitive records are replicated globally to enhance services.
- Aggregated data for analysis: To support global analytics, aggregated, nonsensitive data (such as total sales by region) is replicated to a core data center. This allows the company to gain insights without compromising user privacy. This data may further be replicated to other data centers for specific tasks, such as querying/reporting as well as keeping a copy for disaster recovery in case the core data center fails.
Conclusion
Organizations operating across borders need efficient mechanisms to manage global data while ensuring compliance with regional regulations like GDPR and DPDPA.
XDCR with powerful and precise filtering capabilities offers an effective solution to these challenges. By implementing selective filtering during replication, organizations can ensure that sensitive data remains localized while still sharing relevant, nonsensitive information globally for analysis.
With a well thought out XDCR strategy, organizations can navigate the complexities of global data locality while ensuring data privacy and regulatory compliance, thus maintaining both customer trust and operational effectiveness.
Discover how Aerospike’s Cross Datacenter Replication (XDR) delivers ultra-low latency, precise control and efficient data transfer to enhance global data performance.
